Ford's intelligent vehicles communicate wirelessly, shoot hula hoops out of tailpipes (video)

Imagine how many accidents could be avoided if we all had perfect X-Ray vision -- assuming, of course, that everyone could refrain from being distracted by all the naked pedestrians. Drivers would never be surprised by rapidly slowing traffic, cars broken down around blind curves, or autos zooming into blind spots. No matter how many ads we respond to in the back of Mad Magazine we'll never have that, but Ford has an alternative with its Intelligent Vehicle Research: cars that simply rely on GPS and a wireless data connection to beam their location and speed to each other.

Autos alert their drivers when a car at the front of a convoy is rapidly decelerating or when there's a broken down rig right around the next bend. Interestingly the tech is using WiFi, not cellular data, so range is somewhat limited, but still far enough to warn drivers with blinking lights or trigger an automatic-braking system. It's all demonstrated in the video after the break and, while there are no crazy platooning stunts like Volvo recently showed off, we have to figure that's coming in version 2.0.

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Ford's intelligent vehicles communicate wirelessly, shoot hula hoops out of tailpipes (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/27/fords-intelligent-vehicles-communicate-wirelessly-shoot-hula-h/

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